South Korean Cryptocurrency Exchange Coinrail hacked, hackers stole over $40M worth of ICO tokens

June 11, 2018  By Pierluigi Paganini


Cryptocurrency Exchange continues to be a privileged target for hackers, news of the day is the hack of the South Korean exchange Coinrail.

The hack has happened during the weekend, on Sunday Coinrail announced the cyberheist. Attackers stole over $40M worth of ICO tokens that were maintained in the servers of the exchange.

The company published a data breach notification on its website that currently appears in maintenance mode.

The exchange explained that attackers stole tokens issued during the initial coin offerings (ICOs) of Pundi X (NPXS), NPER (NPER), and Aston (ATX).

“Most notably, the hackers got away with $19.5 million-worth of NPXS tokens that were issued by payment project Pundi X’s ICO. Added to that they scored a further $13.8 million from Aston X, an ICO project building a platform to decentralize documents, $5.8 million in tokens for Dent, a mobile data ICO, and over $1.1 million Tron, a much-hyped project originating from China.” reported TechCrunch.

“That’s according to a wallet address that has been identified as belonging to the alleged attacker, who also got hold of smaller volumes of a further five tokens from Coinrail.”

South Korea is one of the countries with the highest cryptocurrency trading activity, but Coinrail is one of its smaller exchanges operating over there.

According to coinmarketcap.com, the South Korean exchange ranks in world’s top 90 based on trading volume.

After the discovery of the hack, Coinrail immediately put offline its wallets to secure its cryptocurrency assets, it is currently working with the affected ICO companies to freeze the stolen funds.

exchange coinrail hack

Coinrail asked other cryptocurrency exchanges to freeze some of the attacker’s addresses where the coins where transferred.

At the time there is no news about possible compensation for the customers of the exchange, recently Japan’s Coincheck refunded its customers following a cyberheist.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Cryptocurrency Exchange Coinrail, cyberheist)

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Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.





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